In the 1990s and the 2000s, the average nominal wage in Japan declined continuously. This is a sharp contrast to wage trends in other developed countries in the same period. This study seeks to provide new quantitative evidence on the possible factors contributing to the nominal wage decline in...

This paper provides novel evidence on the causal effect on female employment of labor market deregulation by using the 1985 amendments to the Labor Standards Law (LSL) in Japan as a natural experiment. The original LSL of 1947 prohibited women from working overtime exceeding two hours a day; six...

This study analyses the difference in the probability of success in starting a business between male and female entrepreneurs. The novel data set of the participants of business start-up seminars enables us to control for entrepreneurial drive, educational level and managerial experience. In...

This paper proposes a new empirical method to measure the gap between wage and productivity of workers. Our method aggregates Mincer-type human capital function of all workers of a firm and obtains the total labor input. We put it into the Cobb-Douglas production function and estimate the...

The theory of employee discrimination gives a possible explanation for the scarcity of female executive officers. This paper tests the employee discrimination hypothesis by measuring the wage premium received by employees working with female executives against their tastes for discrimination....

During the last decade, economists and policy makers have extensively discussed what types of firms can exploit external markets by exporting and what happens to domestic firms if external competitors penetrate into the home market. Although both theoretical and empirical studies have been...

In this paper, we investigate the volatility of sales at the firm and the aggregate level using the longitudinal dataset of the <i>Financial Statements Statistics of Corporations</i> (FSSC). The main findings are as follows: (1) Firm-level volatility decreased until the mid-1990s but then increased...